MCT decides to impose garbage collection user charges on residents

Tirupati: Municipal Corporation of Tirupati (MCT) freshly decided to impose user charges for garbage collection from households in the city. Similarly, civic body Commissioner PS Girisha ordered the staff of the public health department to enhance the user charges over commercial establishments and shops, because they are generating huge waste every day.

More than 80,000 households and above 30,000 all types of commercial establishments, hotels, hospitals, restaurants were in Tirupati city. From all these houses and commercial establishments every day around 270 tonnes of dry and wet waste is generating.

To collect this much garbage MCT is using a number of dumper placers, trucks, tractors and around 800 sanitation staff in 50 divisions. The Government of India issued guidelines over solid waste management rules and clearly indicated that to collect user charges from stakeholders for garbage removal. To clear the solid waste from the city, MCT has established sophisticated machines for making manure from wet waste at Thukiwakam drainage sewerage recycling plant.

Two years ago MCT had come to an agreement with Rastriaya Seva Samithi (RASS) to use their volunteers services at division level in collecting user charges for garbage clearance. Only few wards it was implemented successfully, officials had failed in collecting user charges from all the division in the corporation. For lost better rank in Swacha Survekshan Survey this was also one of the reasons.

In view of that, the commissioner decided to implement a user charges system as part of 2016 solid waste management policy. For that MCT officials are planning to purge the user charges collection set up which was maintained by the sanitary staff of concern division. Now these responsibilities are going to hand over to the environmental secretary of concern division.

Already in this direction Commissioner issued instructions to the officials concerned to reset up the division level staff net work and prepare them to collect garbage clearance charges from households and commercial establishments. For this corporation has fixed user charges Rs 30 for houses, Rs 50 for shops and other business establishments. Rs 100 for hotels. In addition, tomorrow onwards Corporation officials will impose a fine Rs 1000 to 5000 for plastic sales and usage in the city as per pollution control board guidelines.